Bay Area Climate Change Plans Lack Regional Cooperation

New York City has a plan to keep the subways from flooding. Queensland, Australia, has a plan to keep agricultural lands from drying up. Chicago has a plan to cope with higher temperatures.

In the Bay Area, where climate change is expected to cause flooding, shoreline erosion, heat waves, water shortages and a spread of exotic infectious diseases, it seems as if people are drowning in plans — but with little regional coordination.

One of the biggest fears for Laura Tam, a policy director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association who spends her workdays thinking disastrous thoughts about climate change, is that the lack of planning coordination could leave residents increasingly vulnerable.

“It’s important to plan regionally,” said Ms. Tam, 36, who spent more than a year at the nonprofit research institute holding climate change workshops and interviewing scientists, government and utility representatives and local community leaders. Unless municipalities coordinate their efforts, she said, steps that each takes to protect itself from rising seas and other changes could make matters worse for neighbors. A concrete barrier that one city might build to protect itself from rising seas, for example, could cause erosion in a neighboring city, she said.

In London, which has a comparable population to the Bay Area, the mayor published a climate action plan in October that directs boroughs and government departments to take dozens of specific steps to anticipate global warming’s effects.

No such comprehensive plan has been prepared for the Bay Area, where some 110 towns, cities and counties and scores of government agencies have jurisdiction over their own land, or over issues they regulate and govern. Instead, planning for climate change is being undertaken in an ad hoc manner by a hodge-podge of municipalities and agencies.

Some officials want an obscure umbrella agency called the Joint Policy Committee to take a coordinating role in preparing the Bay Area for the gamut of challenges that climate change could bring, but a political spat over the committee’s role and its future is preventing it from doing so.

Officials opposed to the 21-person panel say it merely duplicates the work of existing agencies. “Really, what the J.P.C. is, it’s an organization that’s trying to find work,” said Scott Haggerty, an Alameda County supervisor and a member of the Joint Policy Committee.

Ms. Tam led a research project that culminated last year in the publication of a 40-page report that lists 33 steps the Bay Area should take to prepare for climate change.

Among the recommendations were that sewage treatment plants and other waterfront infrastructure be replaced or retrofitted to protect them from rising seas. It also called for mud levels in estuaries to be carefully managed to ensure that marshes and wetlands can grow and adapt as water levels rise.

“It’s going to take a lot of resources,” Ms. Tam said. “Few cities and counties have the resources to really devote to the engineering and planning studies necessary to carry out some of the protections that we call for.”

Ms. Tam said regional air quality, water, transportation and other agencies are leading the nation in their efforts to run pilot projects and draft policies to help brace the Bay Area for climate change. But, she said, they do not have the resources or jurisdictional powers to carry out many of the changes that will be needed at the local level.

Instead, agencies like the Bay Area Air Quality Management District urge cities to adopt policies that could protect their residents from climate change. Pleasanton adopted one such recommendation this month when it voted to use light-colored paving that will reflect, rather than absorb, heat from the sun. The recommendations are gradually being adopted by other cities in the region. San Francisco is considering adopting some of the recommendations when it publishes an updated climate action plan later this year.

In October, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a state board that has jurisdiction over the bay and its shorelines, adopted historic rules for reviewing the impact of proposed construction on rising sea levels. The rules require agency commissioners to weigh the benefits and risks of building near undeveloped shorelines, which could help buffer rising seas, before approving construction permits.

The rules were initially drafted to discourage waterfront development, but they were substantially weakened under pressure from developers and the Bay Area Council and other business groups. They cover just one of the many hazards — rising seas — associated with climate change.

So the state board’s commissioners characterized the rules as an interim measure until a regionwide climate change adaptation strategy is adopted. Then they agreed to delegate responsibility for climate change planning to a regional board with few specific duties and no permanent staff — the Joint Policy Committee.

California lawmakers in 2004 voted to create the Joint Policy Committee to improve Bay Area governance and improve levels of communication and cooperation between regional agencies.

But lawmakers and committee members widely deride the committee as dysfunctional. Its members, mostly local elected officials who also serve on the boards of regional agencies, have been generally unable to agree on the tasks that it should undertake.

That has prompted Senator Mark DeSaulnier, Democrat of Concord, to introduce legislation that would force the committee to take on a variety of tasks, including some related to climate change. The Senate passed the bill in January and it awaits an Assembly vote.

“We’re in an evolution on regional governance,” Mr. DeSaulnier said. “A small step in that evolution is to get the J.P.C. to become more responsive.”

Will Travis retired as executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission after the shoreline building rules were adopted and planned to take on the top job at the Joint Policy Committee. He is working for the committee as its lead consultant, but the committee members are split over whether they should accept the climate change adaptation task.

“B.C.D.C. threw the ball,” said Sean Randolph, a member of the Joint Policy Committee who stepped down this month as chairman of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. “The J.P.C. hasn’t quite decided whether it wants to catch the ball yet.”

Mr. Randolph argues that leaving climate change adaptation duties in the hands of individual municipalities and agencies wastes resources and could exacerbate the potential impact of climate changes. “If every city comes up with its plan from scratch,” he said, “then it’s reinventing the wheel.”

But some local elected officials who serve as committee members fiercely oppose that proposal and view the committee as a waste of public money that should be disbanded.

“There are already agencies out there that can deal with the issues that face the nine Bay Area counties,” Mr. Haggerty, the Alameda County supervisor, said.

“If we don’t stop runaway climate change, all of these threats are going to be much worse,” she said. “You can think of it as apocalyptic, but we also have the benefit of time to plan for that kind of apocalypse.”

jupton@baycitizen.org

A version of this article appears in print on February 17, 2012, on page A21A of the National edition with the headline: Cooperation Is at Issue In Climate Change Fight. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe